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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gerald Walls who wrote (96833)	1/20/2000 6:06:00 PM
From: bhagavathi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Gerald, In buying a system, compatibility goes a long way in deciding which CPU to buy. If you are a OS developer you would understand what exceptions are thrown on what conditions, plus what type of flags you would want to set on certain conditions (states of the machine). This information is very crucial in developing reliable OSes & have predictable performance. Now for the sake of argument let us say intel cpu's set a 12th bit in a PSW (processor status word) if a program tries to divide by a 0. If amd's cpu sets any other bit for this condition, now you have a new requirement from OS to monitor different bits of the PSW for different architecture. This produces conditional branches (pre compile) in OSes code. Also at the same time your test bench will have to deal with it separately ( w.r.t. to intel cpu & amd cpu). These test benches are not cheap to set up at OEMs. You can call up any of the OEMs and ask them how much it costs to setup a test/validation bench for a new architecture. Unless OEMs completely fore go any testing. All this tells you how difficult/big the barrier is for entry into this market with new architecture. mula